The only time I had subscriptions was when I was 13-16 yrs old. Prior to 13 I lived near a news stand that sold comics. At 13 we moved to a small town that had no place to buy comics so I had to get subscriptions. I bought Superman, Batman, Spider-Man & the Hulk. I bought other titles whenever I could if we went back to our old town to visit. Then when I got my license at 16 yr old I was able to drive & buy comics off the newsstand again. By 17 a comic store had opened in my area (one that I eventually worked at in college).

I subscribed to Transformers when I was little sprout, 1985 or so.

So I've mentioned before I had a hard time figuring out how monthly comics worked as a kid, as almost every time I got consecutive issues of a series, the Dreaded Deadline Doom struck and a supposedly continued story wasn't but instead got a reprint or a fill in issue the following issue instead. That confusion carried over the first time I had the opportunity to get a subscription too. In the 4th grade, I went to Catholic school fort he first time (this was circa '78 I believe) and the school had a magazine drive fora fund raiser, and one of the options to buy was Marvel Comics. So my folks asked me if I wanted to get 12 Marvel Comics as one of the things we bought in the magazine drive, and I thought cool, I can get 12 comics, thinking I would get 12 different comics and I looked over the list and checked the first box of the 12 I thought I could pick...it was Iron Man, and then found out I had to wait and get 1 issue of Iron Man a month for a year, not 12 new comics to read as soon as they mailed it to me. Had I known, I would have selected a different title (probably Avengers). So for the next year I got to read Iron Man starting with issue 108 or 109 (it was the final issue of the Midas saga) and running to 120 or so (just after the intro of James Rhodes as a character). It's what finally helped me to figure out how the whole continued story thing was supposed to work in comics, and I managed to start buying Avengers regularly off the stands too instead of just getting random issues here and there and filling in missing issues out of 3 bag sets and trades with my cousin. It was towards the end of that subscription that my mom decided I was reading too many comics and wouldn't let me buy any new ones or read any of my old comics for nearly a year (I suspect a good many of my comics got thrown away at that time too as when I was allowed to read them again, some of my old faves were missing). Needless to say I didn't renew my subscription and the following year's magazine drive yielded a subscription to Nat Geo's World magazine for kids, not a comic book and U.S. News for some reason.

I didn't get another subscription until the 80s when the town I lived in had a summer work program for kids to earn money while school was out (cleaning parks, the little league fields, etc.) I worked all summer and put some of the money I made towards subscriptions to Avengers (starting with the Weathermen issue (#210) and going through much of Shooter's second run) and Amazing Spider-Man (the Roger Stern run starting with the Slyde issue (#223?) and including the Juggernaut issues). However, those ran out just as we were moving back to CT, and that was the reason I was given for not being allowed to renew them (when it was in reality my mom not being happy with me reading comics still).

I didn't get another sub until I turned 16 and had a job, and subbed to a few titles when again my mother made rumblings about me spending too much on comics just in case she tried to stop me getting books again, at least my faves would keep coming in the mail-at the time I subscribed to Avengers (I think it was during the Mansion Siege storyline), West Coast Avengers (the Englehart era) and Uncanny X-Men (around the time of Mutant Massacre), but I was impatient and still often bought the new issues off the racks at the comic shop because they came out about 2 weeks before the issues arrived in my mailbox (I was able to later sell the extra copies of X-Men for decent money I didn't renew because of the time lag and because my mother had finally given up trying to get me to stop reading comics.

I didn't do print subs for comics after that until last year, when at the end of the year I subscribed to Heavy Metal because it was such a good deal, and recently did a print sub for the new Doctor Strange series launching in November. Part of the reason for the Heavy Metal sub was to circumvent Diamond and have more $$ go to the publisher (also one of the reasons I decided to drop my pull list), but I was disappointed to find that Marvel's subs are now handled by Midtown Comics and not directly from Marvel taking Diamond out of the equation, so I will not do any other Marvel subs. ( I also now buy my trades form Amazon and other retailers who do not order from Diamond).

-M

One of my fondest memories of a subscription service was told in Day of the 12 Days of Classic Christmas 2014 (page 1):

classiccomics.boards.net/thread/973/second-classic-comics-christmas-2014

The only thing I subscribed to was FOOM, briefly, the last 4 issues*. I was something that never occurred to me, probably because creative teams would change at the drop of a hat and what had been your favourite comic one issue could without warning become a dud the next. I only subscribed to FOOM because there was no other way to get it.



*WRONG! After checking to make sure, I see there were still three issues to go after my subscription ran out. Not sure why I didn't continue - I remember liking the 4 issues I did get.

I remember having several subscriptions to Archie Comics or maybe it was a form to order individual issues? I remember them coming in the mail folded and wrapped in brown paper. I subscribed to several of the digests as well.

Even with the folds, that's a pretty awesome service. Is that common in the UK?